A screenshot from the video game "The Oregon Trail" featuring a headstone that reads, "Here lies Diana. She played this game for BackStory."

Playing the Past

Video Games and American History

12.21.18

The Department of Defense developed the very first video game and “The Oregon Trail” taught a generation to live as a pioneer. “Red Dead Redemption 2” might be a major commercial success, but how historically accurate is it of the Old West? On this episode, Brian, Nathan and Ed explore the relationship between history and video games in America.

video games

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Segments

You Have Died of Dysentery

For many of us, Oregon Trail was our first introduction to video games… and the ravages of dysentery. Nathan talks with Philip Bouchard, Lead Designer on the Apple II version of the Oregon Trail, about his role in revamping the original text-based game in the 1980s.

Red Dead Redemption 2; The Oregon Trail (video game); video games

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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Speaker 1: Major funding for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation.

Ed Ayers: From Virginia Humanities, this is BackStory.

Nathan Connolly: Welcome to BackStory, the show that explains the history behind today’s headlines. I’m Nathan Connolly.

Ed Ayers: I’m Ed Ayers.

Brian Balogh: And I’m Brian Balogh.

Nathan Connolly: If you’re new to the podcast, we and Joanne Freeman are all historians and each week we explore a different aspect of American history.

Brian Balogh: You know, Ed, as historians we’re used to encountering unfamiliar worlds. We encounter then through text and through literature, but BackStory Producer Matt Darroch recently persuaded us to put down those books and pick up a controller, thereby experiencing history, at least for me, in a very new way.

Ed Ayers: Brian, I still think Matt was looking for a creative excuse to bring histories Xbox to work, but nevertheless, you and I were excited to be introduced to the Old West as imagined by the smash hit video game Red Dead Redemption 2. And the game is not always historically accurate, but it certainly was thrilling to encounter the past through this new medium.

Matt Daroch: So as you can see you can go to a saloon here to play poker and that kind of stuff.

Ed Ayers: Where is the library?

Matt Daroch: There’s no library, there’s a gun-

Ed Ayers: No library?!

Matt Daroch: There’s a gun shop up here.

Ed Ayers: Oh, good.

Brian Balogh: I’d [inaudible 00:01:32] for the saloon, that sounds entertaining. Wow, okay, now I walk towards the doors.

Matt Daroch: Absolutely, and you can-

Brian Balogh: Look, he walked up the stairs himself. Come on, go through those swinging doors.

Matt Daroch: Okay, there’s a barber over there as well if you want to cut your hair.

Brian Balogh: Where is the barber?

Matt Daroch: Just straight ahead.

Brian Balogh: Straight ahead?

Matt Daroch: Yeah.

Barber: Hey there, fella.

Brian Balogh: Hey there, fella.

Matt Daroch: Then press the left trigger right here.

Brian Balogh: Oh, left?

Matt Daroch: Hold it down.

Brian Balogh: Wait, what’s a trigger?

Matt Daroch: Right there, you see that?

Brian Balogh: Oh, there are all kinds of buttons on this thing. Okay, so how do I get up, just start-

Matt Daroch: So press B.

Brian Balogh: B. Like people know all of this?

Speaker 8: You got to help me! I’ll pay you.

Matt Daroch: So if you want to talk to her hold L, hold the left trigger.

Speaker 8: We ain’t got a lot of time. Are you going to help me or not?

Brian Balogh: Why in the world would I help her? So Brian goes and gets a haircut.

Ed Ayers: Oh, look at all the blood you have on your [inaudible 00:02:23].

Brian Balogh: Yeah. Oh-oh, lose the law?

Ed Ayers: The cops found you.

Brian Balogh: Oh no!

Speaker 9: There, you see them?!

Brian Balogh: I’m galloping. I’m running as fast as I can with a [inaudible 00:02:36] on my back, you tell me that’s not exciting. Look at me, I’m getting away. If they shoot me they’ll hit him. Yeah, go, go. Yeah, up. Oh, not through the canyon. Here we go, go, go. Do I feel that we’re actually getting away? Do we have any sense of where the danger is?

Matt Daroch: They’re behind you, you are getting away. If you go-

Brian Balogh: I’m just going behind-

Ed Ayers: They’re joined at the [inaudible 00:03:02], this dead guy. I hate to tell you. I told you if we had gone to the library originally we wouldn’t have this problem.
So today in this show we’ll be exploring the relationship between history and video games in America.

Nathan Connolly: We’ll hear from the creator of Oregon Trail about the game that captivated a generation of schoolkids.

Ed Ayers: We’ll be learning about the phenomenon that is Red Dead Redemption 2 and its portrayal of the Old West.

Brian Balogh: And how the history of video games stretches back much farther than you might think.

Nathan Connolly: Now, the first exposure to American history-themed video games that many of us will remember is Oregon Trail, a game that could be found in American classrooms in the 1980s. In the game you took the role of a pioneer progressing across the Oregon Trail in a covered wagon, trying to avoid running out of food, being swept away by rivers, and definitely trying to avoid contracting dysentery. Philip Bouchard was the lead designer and team leader on the Apple II version of the Oregon Trail. I caught up with him to discuss a game which is still fondly remembered by millions.

Philip Bouchard: The product had already existed as a text-only game for quite a few years. A very simple game, but the basic principles had been established many years earlier. So I was handed the topic, but from there on I was given the opportunity to pursue it in any direction I wanted, to re-envision what this game could be. The one key thing I was told: make sure I don’t lose whatever magic made the original so popular.

Nathan Connolly: And what was that?

Philip Bouchard: The original text-only game had these seven attributes or features: you buy supplies in Independence, Oregon before you get started; along the way to Oregon you have the opportunity to hunt for food; you also have the opportunity to visit forts to buy supplies other than food; you must manage your levels of supplies all the way because if you run out of things you’ll die; your rate of travel will vary based upon current conditions like whether there’s a snow storm or whatever; number six, there are frequent misfortunes that happened along the way, random events that impede your progress; and finally number seven, there is two outcomes to this: either you’re going to reach Oregon or you’re going to die. Those were the seven concepts in the original game and those were brilliant.

Nathan Connolly: And so part of your intervention was actually about adding graphics to this text-based game, is that right?

Philip Bouchard: Absolutely, that was a given that there would be a lot of graphics included. I really wanted to use real geographic details. Working with a bigger environment and a bigger budget, I wanted to go with a lot richer set of choices.

Nathan Connolly: What was it about the idea of resource management that was really key to the game’s success for people?

Philip Bouchard: What are you going to need on this 2,000 mile journey? How many sets of clothing? How much food? In the original game you just had a list of supplies. In our version you would get to go into Matt’s General Store and so he can advise you on the different things that you’ll need to purchase before getting going. During the game it’s more subtle. If you break apart, if your wagon tongue or wagon wheel breaks and you haven’t purchased a spare then you’re just stuck. And in fact, it’s quite typical for a player who is playing for the first time just to skip the spare parts, and the first time they get stuck on the trail and unable to move because for lack of a spare part they say, “Okay, next time I play I’m buying spare parts.” So a lot of it has to do with the experience of playing the game more than once and you start learning how essential these different resources are.

Nathan Connolly: Well I got to tell you, Phil, when I was preparing for this I went and I rebooted the game and I started off as a carpenter, and I did pretty well, I got all the way to Oregon and I didn’t have anybody die along the way. Then I played a second time as a banker from Boston and before I got halfway through the trip, three of my companions had already been killed and I just gave up [inaudible 00:07:13]. So repetition didn’t help in my case. But I will say I do remember the mid-1980s as a time where you had games like Oregon Trail or, say, Lemonade Stand in conjunction with choose your own adventure fantasy books and the like. And all of this seems to be part of a moment where kids are learning about choices and their consequences in schools and through these educational platforms.
But the history kind of snuck in on me through the backdoor and I was really amazed actually at how much of the history from this most recent time playing it felt so grounded both in terms of the geography, in terms of the Native Americans that you’re encountering along the way. I mean you really did a tremendous amount to give a sense of authenticity to this environment, is that right?

Philip Bouchard: We pulled out quite a few different books, but the book that proved to be most useful was one that was entitled The Plains Across: The Overland Immigrants and the Trans-Mississippi West 1840 to 1860. And this book came out in ’79, so about five years before we started working on this version of the product.
One of my biggest regrets about things I had to leave out of the original is that I had originally intended a much richer set of interactions with Native Americans along the way. Not just Native Americans, also you might be able to interact with soldiers at the fort or traders and trappers and some immigrants who have wagons broken down. On the real Oregon Trail there were a number of opportunities to barter with Native Americans. We had so many more ideas that just never made it into the product. There was only so much we could fit on those little floppy disks.

Nathan Connolly: I do remember having to trade clothes for passage across one of the rivers, for sure.

Philip Bouchard: Oh, that was included, which was at the Snake River crossing. The Shoshone were experts in how to cross, so hiring a Shoshone guide would increase your odds of crossing.
We interviewed a number of kids who really enjoyed the original. The boys tended to love the original, the girls not so much. And then as we watched the boys, what they really loved was, for the most part, typing “bang” every time they had the opportunity to hunt. So I said, “Well, I would like to expand this so that it supports both genders, it supports different learning styles, people who like to investigate before making decisions, and also have multiple ways of getting through.” You can create a strategy that involves lots of hunting, that will work, or you can create a strategy that involves almost no hunting and still make it work if your other decisions are appropriate and support that main decision.
Well, it turns out one of the things that people thought about the most were the river crossings: are you going to need to take a ferry, are you going into [inaudible 00:10:06] the river, are you going to try to caulk your wagon and float it across? The key to this making it really interesting though was that we created an animation that illustrated the result – I have chosen to float my wagon across and now I get to see the wagon floating across, and I don’t know if it’s going to tip over in the middle or make it all the way across. And the kids loved watching that animation and were sitting on the edge of their seat to see, “Am I going to make it or not?”

Nathan Connolly: That happened to me, my wagon tipped and I was devastated. So Phil, the fate that travelers encounter often times on these Oregon Trails can be many, right? Die of fever, your wagon can tip over, you lose [inaudible 00:10:42]. But the phrase, “You have died of dysentery,” has carried a certain kind of pop culture resonance well beyond the game. Where did that come from?

Philip Bouchard: Well, it’s based on something that I designed into the game and yet is a slight corruption of it, interestingly enough. I was looking at these different diaries and I was noticing what phrases people used in terms of what people were contracting along the way. And I took five of the most common terms, they were often used for what people would sick of. So it would say, “Zeke has dysentery,” or “Sarah has fever.” And then later on if the person is not recovered you may see, “Zeke has died.” Nowhere in the game does it actually say, “You have died of dysentery”.

Nathan Connolly: But the idea, I guess, of the dangers of frontier travel, of these are the kinds of things that can kill you out there.

Philip Bouchard: Right. However, I had no anticipation that that particular one, that dysentery, would be the one that would become the meme.

Nathan Connolly: So given the chaos of the frontier it almost feels like there’s no real way to avoid having calamity or having some near death experience on the Oregon Trail. I mean is there any hack or key balancing act that one can pull off, say at the point where they’re buying their resources or which road they should take when there is a fork, to really make sure that they fare best in the Oregon Trail outcomes?

Philip Bouchard: Maintaining your health makes a big difference. If your health declines to poor then everybody is much more likely to contract diseases.

Nathan Connolly: Should they rest? Is that the idea?

Philip Bouchard: That is a good one. I’ve seen people play it 10 times in a row and never rest ones. Or it’s just slowing your pace a bit. Also if you eat more food then you’re likely to stay healthier, but of course now you run the risk of running out of food.

Nathan Connolly: These feel like life hacks, Phil, this is how you survive life and make it more enjoyable – more resting, more food, take your time. I can dig it, I can dig it.
What do you think are some of the best things about historical gaming that we should preserve?

Philip Bouchard: If you’re creating any kind of role-playing game then you are immersing the player into a historical context. So you’re learning by experiencing. So we can judge the product on that level as how good of an environment have we create? Number two, now we’ve put the player into this environment. Are we actually giving them meaningful decisions? Are these decisions relevant to what real people in that time would have had to face? And number three is exposure to factual information. Number four now, the game should be highly engaging. And indeed that is one of the most powerful aspects of the game. If it is engaging then the student or player is staying alert. Does the player remain engaged with the topic after putting the game aside? They may look up things on their own, they may turn to other students and say, “Hey, what did you do when you got to this place?” And final thing is that a good historical game should provide mental anchors for additional learning. So kids that play Oregon Trail might say, “Oh, Chimney Rock, I’ve heard of that,” or just the whole experience of going to Oregon may be more meaningful because now they’ve experienced it.

Nathan Connolly: In your own life after working on Oregon Trail, did it become an anchor for you to continue to do reading about westward expansion or did it fan your love of history?

Philip Bouchard: Oh absolutely, yes. To me this was equal parts geography and history. I’m a real geography buff, I love to make note of where I’m going and the routes I’m taking. And I still have not yet tried to follow the Oregon Trail but I definitely want to do that some day.

Nathan Connolly: Excellent. Don’t die of dysentery, please.
I was talking to the game’s designer Philip Bouchard about Oregon Trail.

Why We Game

University of Chicago professor Patrick Jagoda explains what we learn when we game and unpacks the early history that shaped contemporary gaming and gamification.

Music:

Tipsy Xylo by Podington Bear

games; military; video games

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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Ed Ayers: While video games are now being taken seriously as a form of artistic and cultural expression, in reality they’ve been important for a long time.

Brian Balogh: Important, Ed? Video games? Look, I understand that there are educational games out there, but really, aren’t real games supposed to be, you know, just like fun?

Ed Ayers: Well Brian, you might think that that’s the case, but it turns out that even popular video games are actually teaching players a way of thinking. Now, to understand what we learn when we plug in the PlayStation, University of Chicago Professor Patrick Jagoda says we should look at the history, of course, behind the invention of the world’s first video game.

Patrick Jagoda: Spacewar! is considered the first true video game, and that was created in 1962 by Steve Russell who was at the time a graduate student at MIT. And Russell created the game on a PDP-1 mini computer that was available to him through a lab that was supported by the US Department of Defense. And more than that, the game was called Spacewar! It was a military simulation that was drawing from the culture and the context of the military and in fact was made on machines that were funded by the military. So it’s right there at the very beginning. But of course the history of war games goes back to a much earlier moment than the 1962.

Ed Ayers: So tell me about those early war games.

Patrick Jagoda: Some of the earliest examples of systematic gamification go back to early war games in the late 18th and the early 19th century.

Ed Ayers: Wow.

Patrick Jagoda: So Prussian war games, in particular true from chess, but then added maps and military units like infantry, cavalry, artillery. And these games were used to train military commanders. And so in the 19th century in particular there were a number of board-based war games that were taken up across Europe, and eventually these games came to influence Dungeons and Dragons, Warhammer, and a number of contemporary games that are still played today.

Ed Ayers: Some of us have heard of economic game theory which seems puzzling to those of us who are not aficionados of that. Can you explain what it is and why it’s called game theory and what amount it had to do with video games?

Patrick Jagoda: In the 1940s we saw the rise of economic game theory based on the work of John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern. Just following World War II, that work got taken up by the RAND Corporation and basically they were using games as ways of modeling economic or political behavior, really any kind of behavior. And probably the most famous example of game theory is the prisoner’s dilemma which became a game for modeling nuclear relations between the US and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. But by the early 1950s there was a perception of limited applications of game theory to the US military. And the military was, of course, a key funding source for research in that era, and as a result of limited applications, game theory began to decline in the mid 1950s.
However, as game theory faltered, war gaming began to thrive at institutions like the Naval War College and the Johns Hopkins Operations Research office. And so some of the same researchers who had been working on game theory models began to work on actual war games and simulations that could be experienced by soldiers and other players. So there is this continuity between mathematical and economic game theory on the one hand and actual game design in the United States on the other.

Ed Ayers: If we think about the history of gaming that you’ve helped us understand, it seems that there’s kind of a connection between the military and consumer capitalism that seemed to create the context in which these games grow. Do the games bear the imprint of that world?

Patrick Jagoda: Yes, absolutely. So early military games are all about competition. It’s either two sides or more sides compete against one another. And this goes back to chess. Going back to the 19th century, we see writers thinking about chess as a way of training military commanders and politicians. War games start to do this work much more explicitly. But all of those games are fundamentally competitive, there are winners and there are losers. That kind of logic exceeds military games, of course. So much of contemporary capitalism and consumerism is based on competitive thoughts.

Ed Ayers: It seems that I hear you saying that there are sort of deep structures in games that are independent in some ways of what they seem to be on the surface. Can you tell us about that?

Patrick Jagoda: Sure. So many games are about decision making. What you’re fundamentally doing as a player is making a decision about strategy A versus strategy B. And this becomes even more literal with computer games and video games. The logic behind so many contemporary games has to do with decision trees where you’re making a dialog choice or you’re deciding where to move your avatar. And when you break down those choices, they’re usually quite binary. Do you go left or do you right? Do you make a moral choice or do you make an immoral choice? And computation in particular has an effect on games becoming more binary than they need to be. When you think another analog games, and here I would include Dungeons and Dragons and tabletop games for instance, may of those kinds of games are based on storytelling and open-ended forms of role playing. Those games are far less binary in the worlds that they make available to players and those games ask players not merely to make decisions that have been preset by designers but to imagine their own worlds and to occupy those worlds.

Ed Ayers: Many of us who don’t play video games, you point out, still have a gamified life a little bit. Can you talk about what that looks like, how the games have saturated life beyond the video game?

Patrick Jagoda: In the early 21st century we’ve seen gamification used in areas like business, dating, education, exercise, healthcare, and warfare just to name a few areas. If you think about the way that dating apps are set up, for instance, the interfaces of those apps don’t look so different from the interfaces of certain kinds of mobile games.
So critics of gamification have pointed out that gamification often uses only the most superficial aspects of the art form of games in the service of profits. And one of the biggest problems with gamification is that it focuses on extrinsic over intrinsic motivations. In other words, it gives us points, badges, and leader boards, it gives us numbers and rewards to motivate ongoing progress, but it doesn’t necessarily give us deep, meaningful reasons to want to continue playing the game.
I think there are games that strive for intrinsic motivations, games that are more artistic or are more thoughtful about their narratives, but there are also all of these examples of apps or games that are created merely to train someone to do something or to change someone’s behavior. And sometimes those apps and those games can be quite manipulative.

Ed Ayers: So it sounds as if you’d think that gamification is here to stay and that it could either be put to good purposes or less worthy ones.

Patrick Jagoda: Yes, absolutely. Games can be used in service of many things. And so many of our games today are competitive rather than cooperative, and I think there’s a real space for cooperative games and experimental genres that exceed first-person shooters or real-time strategy games to make a positive difference in our world.

Ed Ayers: Do we have reason to believe that people actually want to play cooperative games?

Patrick Jagoda: Absolutely. Think about how many cooperative games are popular. So we have board games like Pandemic, there are tabletop games like Dungeons and Dragons, there are video games like Porta 2 or Left 4 Dead, of course there are online games like World of Warcraft in which you work cooperatively within a guild. And I think there’s a larger point to be made here. The history of games gives us many kinds of games: competitive games, cooperative games, games of chance, role-playing and theater games, less structured forms of play and make-believe, and yet in American culture in our time competitive games have become dominant. We see this with professional sports or video games like Overwatch, but competition is a particular ideology of this historical moment, it’s a specific economic engine. But the history of games shows us that another world is possible. Cooperative games can be every bit as engaging and fulfilling as competitive games. I think we’ve only scratched the surface in terms of how far we can go down the road of those non-binary open world games.

Ed Ayers: Patrick Jagoda is an Associate Professor of English, Cinema, and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. He’s the co-founder of the Game Changer Chicago Design Lab.

Red Dead Contention

Red Dead Redemption 2 is the latest blockbuster title released by Rockstar Games. Set in the Old West as the era of cowboys and outlaws is fading, the game has received an outpouring of rave reviews – hailed as one of the best open world video games ever. But some have taken issue with the game’s narrative, which draws inspiration from popular Western movies. Historian Esther Wright contends that despite its innovative gameplay, Red Dead Redemption 2 is saddled by historical inaccuracies and themes of white masculinity.

Music:

East Hardwood Too by Craig S. Elliot

Red Dead Redemption 2; historical fiction; video games; western (film genre)

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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Last October marked the release of Red Dead Redemption 2, one of the most highly anticipated video games of all time. Set in 1899, as the golden age of the Old West is fading, the story follows a gang of outlaws as they travel westward away from greed and oppression or what they see as the ills of a rapidly civilizing society. Along their journey to this utopian west the gang confronts a world rife with brutality and violence.

Speaker 12: Bastard, I didn’t do anything!

Speaker 13: Damn fool!

Speaker 14: With Red Dead Redemption 2, Rockstar Games has set out to create its most ambitious open world experience to date. It is an epic tale of outlaw life that seamlessly blends story with action.

Speaker 13: Arthur, let’s go quick!

Speaker 14: An exploration with choice, all under the constant treat of danger.

Ed Ayers: You play as Arthur Morgan, a rough-and-tumble outlaw and prominent gang member exploring an open world with over 100 main missions, 200 animal species, and 500,000 lines of dialog. Whether you want to enjoy the stunning landscapes or stir up trouble at a saloon, the game lets you define your own Wild West experience.

Speaker 14: You can rob a train, passerby, or a coach, hold up a store, burgle a house, or go loan sharking.

Arthur Morgan: I’m here for money. Where is it!?

Speaker 14: Or you can simply go off and explore alone if you’re feeling brave enough. The countryside, towns, and frontier are full of rival gangs and outlaws, each different but all of them deadly.

Ed Ayers: To say that Red Dead Redemption 2 has been a smashing hit would be an understatement. In its first three days after it was released the game raked in $725 million in sales, the biggest opening weekend of any entertainment product in history. But while the gameplay is undoubtedly groundbreaking, some have taken issue with the game’s narrative which draws heavily on popular western movies.

Esther Wright: With the first Red Dead Redemption they were obviously sort of taking their cues from a very particular kind of western film from a very particular period in the western kind of genre.

Ed Ayers: That’s historian Esther Wright. She says that despite its technical achievements, the game suffers from a story hampered by historical inaccuracies and themes of white masculinity.

Esther Wright: Heavily influenced by the so-called revisionist westerns, the wild bunch, moving all the way down to more recent films like Unforgiven or The Assassination of Jesse James. It’s really sort of taking a crystallization of the western genre and western history around masculine identity, around white masculinity, and brutalization and violence is really the kind of the key. They are sort of a touchstone for the way film has been depicting western history. This image of America’s western past has currency as we see in kind of contemporary westerns like The Hateful Eight or TV shows like Westworld and Oscar winners like The Revenant. This is sort of I guess one of the dominant ways that western history is being packaged by media at the moment.

Ed Ayers: Sort of a Nihilistic approach, right? In which everybody is evil and it’s just differing degrees. Typically that’s some of the characters. A utopian outlaw sounds kind of interesting but is the rest of this huge cast equally interesting?

Esther Wright: It is a huge cast, they’ve really sort of pushed outwards from the first game. So they’ve really expanded this vision of who was in the West in good and bad ways I think. So there was a lot of talk before the game came out about the fact that it was being more inclusive and that translated as having more women in the game. There was a sort of big absence of women. There were a few women characters in the first game, but this one does sort of I guess improve in their visibility, I suppose. So the gang is your family, yeah, it’s this family unit that you can hunt and you can provide for and you get money for, and it’s about keeping them safe. So it’s interesting to have a couple of women, there is a child in the mix of all this. So I guess the composition of the gang itself has changed and even to sort of include diversity in other ways. So there was also kind of talk about the way that it now included some black American outlaws, there is a Native American character who’s part of the gang.
So on a surface level this … And this was emphasized really in marketing that they were sort of pushing the boundaries of what not only they had done before but what a lot of western cinema had done before. But I don’t think really that this has translated into the sort of progressive message that the game wants to send.

Ed Ayers: It sounds to me like a great lost opportunity, right? To have that audience, that skill of creating this realistic detail, this kind of expectation and even these claims, but it doesn’t sound that they’ve really delivered on them historically.

Esther Wright: Well, it’s interesting really. It’s kind of the distinction to be made between historical accuracy and historical authenticity. So for example, there are a lot of elements about the game that you could say are accurate just as there a lot of things that are inaccurate. So you get a lot of inappropriate depictions of historical events and movements. So for example, you can see women campaigning for suffrage or you’ll see sort of civil war veterans hanging around, that you see the influence of technologies like the railroad, or you get a sense of booming business and Native American tribes that have been moved to reservations. There’s hundreds of different types of animals in this world and lots of different types of guns. So it’s very heavily detail-oriented and it’s probably not productive to say that that’s not accurate, but the whole point is to make this historical world rather feel real and believable. And doing that has more, yeah, I guess to do with the kind of flexibly defined subjective notion of what’s authenticity.
So it’s interesting because I think sometimes game designers, game makers can talk about the fact that this is not history, this is historical fiction. And this was something that we saw in the marketing of this game. But I think that’s really a kind of false dichotomy. These game makers, like filmmakers, like writers, have immense power to shape sort of popular understandings of the period. And to kind of try and claim that these games are just fictional rather than history proper is a really kind of outmoded and traditional distinction to make. So I think it’s a try to hide behind this claim that it’s just fictional is a way of managing criticism and it’s kind of a have your cake and eat it too scenario.

Ed Ayers: Yeah, that’s what I was going to say. It’s like film, really, which excels at the way things look. Is it possible that this is a satire, and it’s a satire of the genre of the film rather than really thinking about history very seriously?

Esther Wright: Well, I think if you look at Rockstar’s history in terms of the games they make, part of their brand really is doing satire, doing satire of America past and present. But I think despite the fact that I think that shields them a lot, they are trying to make and they are making very serious claims and they are often in very serious engagements with certain aspects of America’s past. It’s like saying, “Well, it’s not proper history but we’re going to talk about what happened to Native Americans.” As if it’s sort of like a progressive step. But it shouldn’t stop them from being criticized for the way that they do that. And often times in their marketing of their games they try to sell these games as being historically authentic or having basis in truth and fact. So we shouldn’t really shy away from treating them as a form of history.

Ed Ayers: Is there a scene that seems to you to capture some of these tensions and inaccuracy or compromises?

Esther Wright: So one example that we can draw on is the way that, as I was saying earlier, the suffragette movement gets represented in the game. So there’s one mission in particular where a young man from a sort of prominent family asks you to protect histories girlfriend who she’s joined up with these women who are campaigning for suffrage. And as Arthur Morgan you have to drive the cart of women sort of shouting and holding placards into the town to the step to the town hall where they sort of stand and they give their speeches. So in theory you’re being positioned on the right side of history, you are helping these women kind of in their campaign for suffrage and for equal voting rights and you sort of stand and you listen to them for a few minutes and listen to what they’re saying, the leader is saying about giving women their rights. But then almost inevitably the mission sort of dictates that you then walk around the corner and you end up in a fight with a guy who’s not happy about the fact that his little brother or his cousin is dating someone from an opposite family in town.
So it’s just one of so many examples where these kind of real, serious things about America’s past are used as kind of historical texture that underpins this sort of narrative that completely revolves around white masculinity and violence and how these sorts of things can only really exist in these very tiny ways that really don’t sum up to being meaningful engagements with the campaign for women suffrage.

Ed Ayers: Can you imagine a Red Dead Redemption 2 that was both fun to play, which I guess is its primary challenge because it’s a game, but that would have not done such violence to the historical record?

Esther Wright: I think it’s possible. And if there’s any company that has the means and the resources and the power to do something different, it is a company like Rockstar. It’s about where you take the time to push this realism. And even in small things like having a different character to play as. You are confined to playing as Arthur Morgan who is this white male outlaw. What’s to say that you can play the other side of these issues, play as a Native American, play as a woman? I mean video games haven’t shied away from trying to represent periods in the past from different perspectives.
Like for example the Mafia series of games, the one that came out in 2016, Mafia 3, that allowed you to control and play as a black American character who is a Vietnam veteran in 1968 in a sort of fictionalized version of New Orleans and having all the kind of civil rights and everything going on in the background.
So it is possible to do these sorts of things and to make them fun to play and to make them games that people want to play, it’s just about sort of thinking outside of really kind of traditional historical imaginations, I think.

Ed Ayers: Ester Wright is a PhD student at the University of Warwick. She studies the relationship between contemporary video games and film.

Advancing Indigenous Heritage In Never Alone

Video games not only have the ability to teach us about history; they can also help us learn more about unique communities and cultural backgrounds. In the 2014 game Never Alone, users play as an Alaskan Native girl and her arctic fox companion as they venture through a mighty blizzard. Brian talks with Amy Fredeen, Lead Cultural Ambassador for Never Alone, about the game’s design and the Alaskan Native stories incorporated in the game.

Music:

Pink Gradient by Podington Bear

American Indians; Native American culture; storytelling; video games

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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Brian Balogh: While some commercial video games have been criticized for stereotyping native populations, others have actually worked side by side with native communities on the game’s development. Take for example the 2014 video game Never Alone. It’s based on folklore and stories of an Alaskan indigenous population called the Inupiaq. You play as a young Inupiaq girl and her arctic fox companion and you venture through a might blizzard to save your village. Along the way you encounter spirits and characters from Inupiaq stories and learn more about the group’s cultural history. I know for a guy from Miami I learned a hell of a lot.

Speaker 17: [foreign 00:37:12]

Brian Balogh: I talked with Amy Fredeen about the video game. She was the lead cultural ambassador for Never Alone. She says their mission was to make sure that Inupiaq people were in control of telling their own story in the game.

Amy Fredeen: Throughout the game we had about 24 cultural ambassadors engaged in the making of the game. And what ended up happening is we were filming those cultural ambassadors as we were developing the game and we realized what a treasure we had in that over 40 hours of footage. So we distilled it down and created these cultural insights in the game. And so essentially as you see the northern lights come on the screen, once you achieve a certain level there you can pause gameplay or you can wait until later to hear about the sky people and what really is.
The cool thing about this video game is it’s built on that story, they call it Kunuuksaayuka, and it is a story about an endless blizzard. The story itself only takes about five minutes to tell, but what we did was we wove in different recurring themes from Alaskan native stories from across Alaska, so whether it’s the little people out on the tundra or the sky people which are the northern lights or even our spirit helpers.

Brian Balogh: Maybe you could share with me one of your favorite oral histories for those players that get that far.

Amy Fredeen: I have to say my favorite one is the sky people because it’s shocking and you see this beautiful feature on the video game and then you hear the story. And I’ll paraphrase it, we have several of our cultural ambassadors explain what it is from what they heard from their parents.
But essentially the aurora borealis or the northern lights are the youth that passed before they grew up. And so these are little kids who’ve passed away who are playing in the sky. And that sounds beautiful and it’s great. But sky people really was a tool for us to teach our kids how to be safe outside. And so you don’t go outside and play without your hood up because if you did and the northern lights went out, those little kids could come down and chop your head off and play football with your head, which is Eskimo football for us.

Brian Balogh: And you would join those sky people?

Amy Fredeen: Yes, essentially you would

Brian Balogh: You must have learned a lot in figuring out this story for yourself. What was it like searching for this story?

Amy Fredeen: I have to be honest, it was one of the best gifts I ever had through my job. And one of the most amazing things was being able to really connect to some of our culture bearers in the community. The story Kunuuksaayuka is a well-known story across northern Alaska, but Robert Nasruk Cleveland was the storyteller most associated with this particular version of Kunuuksaayuka.
So we had to go really find the person who was holding the story. We found Minnie Gray, who is the eldest surviving child of Robert Nasruk Cleveland. She is an elder now and a culture bearer in her own right [inaudible 00:40:42]. One of the things we learned from Minnie Gray is that each storyteller tells a story different. They may highlight certain aspects of it so a listener can latch onto a key lesson or they may use a different cadence so that it engages the audience in a different way.
But the most powerful message she gave to us was when we first met her in her daughter’s apartment. Her daughter’s apartment was filled with kids and grandkids and I was really nervous because it was Minnie Gray, she is such a great culture bearer for us. I knew she probably never played a video game in her life so I didn’t know how she would feel about us making a video game. But when we explained to her what we wanted to do and how we want to preserve our traditional stories and language through this video game she said, “Of course you should be doing this. This is how my grandkids are going to hear this story.” And she looked and there were her grandkids playing games on phones. And so it was one of these amazing times when you just happened to be in a space with an entire family and you see how that story can live on beyond the current generation.

Brian Balogh: Well, speaking of passing of information from one generation to the next, part of that community were high school students, right? What did they have to say about this when you first approached them?

Amy Fredeen: Yeah, I think there was probably a combination of pure excitement and disbelief. There is not a lot of media examples out there that portray the Alaska native people in a way that really reflects us as a living people and a living culture. But as we brought the game to test with the youth and as we continued to engage them, you could just see the excitement on their faces.
And I think one of my favorite things about the launch of the game is we hosted a booth at the Elders and youth Conference in Anchorage, Alaska, which is thousands of elders and youth coming together. And getting to watch two complete strangers from our youth population sit down in a booth and start playing Nuna and the fox together without knowing each other and just seeing the instant connection they made through the gameplay.

Brian Balogh: Well, surely there are other video games that represent indigenous peoples. Are you aware of any? Did you use them by way of comparison? And how is your game distinctive?

Amy Fredeen: When we first entered into this agreement with E-Line Media to make Never Alone we did a six month landscape of what was happening in the video game industry and indigenous cultures. And what we found is there weren’t a lot of good examples back then. If there were good games, they weren’t a commercial success, or if they were out there they portrayed indigenous populations in a very stereotypical way or they were pure appropriation.
But I think what we ended up doing is we looked at other mediums. And so what was happening in movies, in some of the successful movies back then at the time. We were inspired by movies like Whale Rider, ones that truly took the voice of a community and wove it into the storyline and kept true to it.

Brian Balogh: Are you a parent?

Amy Fredeen: I am.

Brian Balogh: How old is or are your kids?

Amy Fredeen: My kids are both teenagers. My eldest is in college and my youngest is a junior in high school. And I really thought being on a video game design team would make them think I’m cool, but that hasn’t happened yet. But they both played Never Alone and they’ve really enjoyed it. They’re avid gamers.

Brian Balogh: Well, that is terrific except did you get pushback from parents saying, “Well, wait a second. I spend a big part of my day trying to get my kids to go outside, to do things other than video games.”?

Amy Fredeen: When we’ve had those conversations there was definitely concern, particularly with the other traditional activities, that kids do still get out there and they do subsistence hunting and fishing. One of the things we were cognizant of is that our kids are going to be connected to some sort of electronic at least eight hours a day, whether it’s their phone or their computer. We want to provide a little avenue for them to go on and have a positive experience through this video game. And it’s not that all games that are “shoot ’em up” are bad games, but there’s not very many games out there that can spark curiosity and interest in what is largely an unknown culture across the world. And so when we did this, we did it with the hope that it could be a very distinct experience for our kids seeing themselves on the screen but also allow them to be proud because they have something in popular media that reflects them as a people.

Brian Balogh: And as lead cultural ambassador, wearing that hat, forget the parent hat now, have you achieved your goal?

Amy Fredeen: I think it’s achieved way more than I ever dreamed possible. This is a game that even four years after its launch continues to have sales, continues to have interest from media and research and educational institutions. And so for us, not only are we seeing the connection our kids are making here locally but we know that we’ve been able to reach over 680 million people across the world. That is 680 million people who have never heard the Inupiaq language spoke, and the entire video game is narrated in the Inupiaq language with subtitles. And so that is something more powerful to preserve our culture than we ever dreamed possible.

Brian Balogh: Amy Fredeen is the Executive Vice President and CFO for the Cook Inlet Tribal Council in Anchorage, Alaska. She also served as the lead cultural ambassador for the video game Never Alone.
Well, it’s pretty courageous of you guys to hand me the controller for this discussion given that I didn’t know what a controller was when you handed it to me.

Ed Ayers: Yeah, your finger are kind of itchy there.

Brian Balogh: I’m going to try not to create any nuclear explosions, all right? I do know, Ed, that you actually enjoy these video games, if that’s what you call them.

Ed Ayers: Well, I have in the past. And I was fascinated with them when they were first emerging in the ’70s and ’80s. And we bought all these new games on floppy disks. So you’d get Oregon Trail, the famous one, and it came on like multiple floppy disks that you had to swap in and out. And I just found it fascinating that you could … Well, there’s this whole new medium and that we might do something remarkable in it. And the fact that Oregon Trail emerged so early and it was so captivating, so obviously I’d sit there with my kids on my lap and we would navigate the Oregon Trail together. I’d have to say as I grew older and the kids grew older my son really got into them, but then I decided that I just don’t really have much to do with them. I do think it’s one of the clearest markers of generations, the sort of commitment to playing a video game as a leading form of entertainment.

Brian Balogh: Well, let’s that theory. And if only we had a younger … Oh! Is that you laughing, Nathan?

Ed Ayers: He’s laughing at us, not with us, Brian.

Brian Balogh: All right, is Ed right in his theory based on an end of three?

Nathan Connolly: [foreign 00:48:46] That is Japanese that I learned from playing a video game called Soulcalibur II. And I played it hours after hours. It means, “No one will take Soul Edge from me,” which is this mythical sword that animates the game. And there are tons of Japanese phrases that I’ll spare you because I know my Japanese only goes as far as what I can remember from the video game.

Ed Ayers: That sounded very persuasive.

Brian Balogh: You certainly convinced me, yeah.

Nathan Connolly: No, I mean the Oregon Trail bug was something that I actually encountered and it was in some ways a starter for games like Chivalry, games like Dynasty Warriors. There are tons of these games that emerged that are absolutely immersive in their evocation of history. Dynasty Warriors in particular is a game based on basically the founding myth of the nation of China, so three kingdoms that emerged the opening of the Han dynasty and there are kingdoms that are full of mythical warriors and you can take any one of them and effectively recreate Chinese history. And so as a teenager, even a 20-something, I would spend hours playing this game. And you can play it online, with friends, and you literally get to re-craft the story of the making of these dynasties. Soulcalibur, where I gave you my little Japanese piece, was actually mythical but rooted in 16th century mercenary culture. So there is a way in which these environments, again like Red Dead Redemption or Oregon Trail, are key to how you connect so strongly with them historically.

Ed Ayers: I’m not really certain that what I said is true. Is it that clear a generational marker or not?

Nathan Connolly: Well, I think there are reasons now why one, people are who are of a variety of different ages are associated with and tapping into video games. Online gaming from what the research shows has people in their sixties down to pre-puberty kids who are playing these games on the same platform. And I think it’s really stark because there are very few aspects of American life where elders and kids and middle-aged people are actually encountering each other as peers. So that to me represents a really important historical breakthrough, frankly.

Ed Ayers: You’ve noticed that what film and TV are really good at about history is the way things look. We can recover that. It strikes me the only thing that we can really know is authentic is that this looks like what I think ancient China looked like, this looks like what I think Japan looked like in the age of the samurai or whatever. Does it create the illusion of authenticity in which all the effect and the actions of people are really ourselves being projected back into those environment?

Nathan Connolly: I think there are allusory elements to it, there’s an element of allusion certainly. But as we have seen, as the games themselves have gotten bigger, more expansive, they’ve tapped historians, right? I mean franchises like Assassin’s Creed have historians on the payroll. Red Dead Redemption couldn’t be built without historians who had done work in turn of the century western America. Even Oregon Trail had certain elements of it that were rooted in what scholars ultimately uncovered. And so I think there’s a real expectation nowadays, frankly, that you can’t just make this stuff up, right? That there has to be some way that you can ground this in a somewhat more real, sometimes more scholarly understanding of the past.

Brian Balogh: But why does Red Dead Redemption look a lot more like the TV westerns I watched growing up in the 1960s than anything I’ve read among the scholarship in the last 25 years?

Nathan Connolly: That’s a phenomenal question and I think it points to the fact that for many of us, of this generation, our chief referent to history before video games was television. And so the visual grammar of TV is going to be there. And maybe you’re right, maybe it’s more of a mashup of TV history and written history than even I would acknowledge from the outset. But I still think you have to have something there at the level of language, at the level of custom, of environment that in some cases the old TV studios weren’t always necessarily committed to capturing.

Ed Ayers: So they are authentic. They’re authentic to the TV images that we have, right?

Brian Balogh: Just as early TV was authentic to radio that came before.

Ed Ayers: Yeah, right.

Brian Balogh: I just want to say I think anything that gets millions of people interested in a historical period is probably a good thing as long as we do our jobs to let them know what things were really like once that interest is piqued.

Ed Ayers: I don’t know. The interview that I did with Esther Wright suggest that to spend almost a billion dollars to make a game in which the majority of the population is marginalized in exactly the same way as older media is actually setting us back.

Brian Balogh: Well, that’s a good point.

Ed Ayers: Yeah, so does that mean you think we really shouldn’t try? That the logics game playing and the logics of history don’t really align enough that we could use this incredibly immersive environment to recreate historic scenarios that we would actually learn something about by exploring?

Nathan Connolly: I would here connect back to Brian’s point about television, which is that television provided a certain sight of American myth making. And I think video games, similarly to your point Ed, have that danger of giving us a flat picture. And the fact is that that is not going to go away. The platform of gaming is not going to go away. In fact, it’s only going to become more immersive with things like virtual reality and such, right?
I didn’t become a video game programmer, in spite all the hours I spent playing games. I became a historian. And what the difference was for me was that video games could never approach the magic of touching a primary document, of actually coming into physical contact with the pasts. And in that sense there’s always going to be an advantage that we’ll have as scholars and who are teaching this material and who are putting the past literally in the student’s hands instead of that controller, right? When you roll up to an actual primary source, a parchment, you see an old picture, I mean that kind of tactile connection to the past is really powerful. And I would say that’s going to always be our advantage over whatever digital platform next emerges to try to capture fragments of the past. I mean I think we’re always going to be able to touch students and even other communities in much more visceral and meaningful ways because we are able to connect them with the actual stuff. And to me that is encouraging.

Ed Ayers: That’s going to do it for us today. Do get in touch. You’ll find us at backstoryradio.org or send us an email to backstory@virginia.edu. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter @backstoryradio. And whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.

Nathan Connolly: BackStory is produced at Virginia Humanities. Mayor support is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Johns Hopkins University. Additional support is provided by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities, and the environment.

Speaker 2: Brian Balogh is Professor of History at the University of Virginia. Ed Ayers is Professor of the Humanities and President Emeritus of the University of Richmond. Joanne Freeman is Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University. Nathan Connolly is the Herbert Baxter Adams Associate Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University. BackStory was created by Andrew Windham for Virginia Humanities.